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MARCH 2ND - JOHN FORD - THE ART OF DRAWING



Chris Lattimer, our acting Chair, announced the arrangements for our coach trip to London on Sunday the 8th of May. The coach will take us to the Tate Britain gallery where we will have the opportunity to visit the WaterColour exhibition as well as the Tate’s permanent collection. We were pleased to learn that Eve Tappenden has recovered after her recent accident and is prepared to return to the post of Secretary. No other nominations were received and Eve was proposed, seconded, and re-appointed. Eve took the Chair and reminded the members of the painting day at the Arrow Valley and went on to ask one of our members, John Ford, to give his presentation on “The Art of Drawing”

John stated his traditional view on the importance of good drawing and felt that many paintings that were otherwise very good, were unsuccessful because the underlying drawing was bad. He felt that anyone can improve their drawing abilities and supported this view with an explanation of how the various functions of the brain like speech, visual perception, memory and physical control are shared between the left and right sides of the brain. It appears that one or other side of the brain does not have the exclusive control of a particular function but will be biased towards that function to a greater or lesser degree. Much experimental work has been done on normal brains where the two halves are connected and can communicate, and on brains where this interconnection no longer exists. Enough is known about the location of the functions involved in the act of drawing, to enable training exercises to be devised to improve drawing performance. With visual aids and demonstrations, John described a series of drawing exercises. In general, these were designed to strengthen visual observation and control of the drawing hand while minimising the influence of memory. We all have stored information on images and shapes in our memory and the intrusion of this information can interfere with our observation of the subject.

A good exercise is to draw a familiar subject in an unusual position; an inverted portrait head is a prime example. Preconceived ideas of the shapes and positions of the features do not apply and the artist is obliged to rely on observation, literally treating the face as a landscape. In the same way, constructing a drawing from the subject’s negative shapes helps to eliminate the influence of memory. A challenging exercise in observation and control, referred to as blind contouring, is to keep the drawing hand and drawing surface out of sight while making a continuous line drawing of the subject. In all the exercises, early attempts will be distorted but John assured us that performance improves with practice.

John continued with a discussion of some common mistakes in drawing. For portraiture, he showed the construction of the features and how they were positioned in the typical face. For landscapes, particularly those where buildings were included, he explained the fundamentals of perspective and gave some useful advice on the use of a rectangular sighting card as an aid in establishing the correct inclinations of the main lines of the drawing. For any complicated subject; landscape, portrait or still life, he showed how the drawing could be simplified by analysing the subject and breaking it down into an assembly of simple shapes. For those artists who are reluctant to include figures in their drawings, he advised using the “stick figure” approach but with the refinement that the width of the shoulders and hips are included to indicate the posture accurately.

All the information and advice was very much appreciated and John invited anyone who wished to discuss a drawing problem, to approach him informally at any of our monthly meetings.